I’ve argued for a long time that a lot of people are going to be annoyed by how similar President-elect Donald Trump is to President Obama on economic policy.

The odd thing is, so far those most annoyed are not the ones who rightly criticized Obama for doing what Trump is doing now; rather, they mostly seem to be liberals who praised Obama for spending unseemly amounts of money to induce job preservation, yet suddenly object to Trump playing this same corporatist game.

The big news this week is that Trump has cut a deal with air conditioner manufacturer Carrier that has resulted in the company keeping 850 jobs in Indiana that had been Mexico-bound. Carrier’s threat to move in order to save $15 million in the first year came in spite of its having already received substantial government inducements to stay.

Trump’s big victory (and politically speaking, it is a victory) includes further inducements and subtle threats over the federal contracts of Carrier’s parent company. The up front cost appears to be $7 million in subsidies, but given other costs — which include a hit to the company’s profitability and its ability to call in a favor later from President Trump — it will likely end up costing taxpayers at least as much as the payroll of the plant in question.

Now, some of us remember those 2 million jobs that were supposedly “created or saved” by president Obama’s $831 billion stimulus package in its first year, and even the less likely claims of 3.7 million over two years. Even if those numbers are accurate, then those jobs cost the taxpayer between $400,000 and $200,000 each.

But that probably understates the case. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, with the benefit of three years’ hindsight, published estimates in 2012 suggesting that the stimulus had resulted in only between 200,000 and 1.5 million more Americans being at work by then than would have been without any stimulus. That comes to somwhere between $540,000 and $4.1 million in costs to the taxpayer for every “created or saved” job that existed three years later.

In other words, Obama could have hired every single worker affected by the stimulus to a $50,000 full-time work-from-home job with the federal government for three years after the crisis, and the Treasury would have been considerably better off than it is today. It makes Trump’s interference with Carrier (up-front costs of $8,300 a job, but surely more later) seem efficient by comparison.

Also from the Washington Examiner

“Hillary is a very resilient person. I mean, she has dealt with an awful lot in her life,” Kaine said.

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12/01/16 12:12 PM

But that doesn’t make what Trump is doing in following Obama’s example good or right. Government interference on behalf of small groups of workers is always a crowd-pleaser, as Trump is finding now to his delight. But it comes with opportunity costs that are always overlooked and usually much larger to society as a whole. As Frederic Bastiat would point out, we are able to see the workers at Carrier who keep their jobs because of Trump’s intervention. But we are unable to see the much larger number of people who would be better off, and perhaps hold jobs that will now never be created, if companies’ business investments were made rationally based on their own interests and not based on government threats or inducements.

What is heartening — and I don’t say this completely out of sarcasm — is that those who erroneously praised President Obama for making exactly the same mistake but on a grander scale have suddenly discovered the existence of those opportunity costs. All I can say is: Welcome to the club, we hope you stay.

Even Bernie Sanders, who had once supported President Obama’s stimulus package despite noting that it “is not perfect,” now writes that “Trump’s Band-Aid solution is only making the problem of wealth inequality in America even worse.” He’s right, because government bullying and bribing of business to make irrational decisions — something I’m sure we’ll see a lot of in the coming months — carries diffuse costs that will harm the livelihoods and purchasing power of millions. That’s the trade-off for the concentrated benefit it brings to a small number of workers.

Maybe President Obama really has cured America of its unhealthy desire for more robust government direction of commercial and investment decisions. Either that, or it’s just a lot of sour grapes and political hackery.

By David Freddoso (@freddoso) • 1/24/17 6:49 PM David Freddoso Commentary Editor The Washington Examiner http://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/images/static/authors/Freddoso-3.jpg Who is in charge ...

By David Freddoso (@freddoso) • 12/29/16 3:07 PM David Freddoso Commentary Editor The Washington Examiner http://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/images/static/authors/Freddoso-3.jpg Here’s one way of ...

By David Freddoso (@freddoso) • 1/30/17 6:56 PM David Freddoso Commentary Editor The Washington Examiner http://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/images/static/authors/Freddoso-3.jpg There was no love ...